Latin-1
Latin-1 (or more formally, ISO-8859-1) is a character encoding standard. It defines a set of characters used for major western European languages.
The Distributed Proofreaders website used Latin-1 for processing all of its books, from its creation until May 19th, 2020. After that, it changed to the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode.
But What Is Latin-1?
Latin-1 is two sets of letters.
First are all the ASCII characters. If your computer was made in an English-speaking country, these are probably the letters you see right on your keyboard. You can type them without resorting to popups or special keyboard layouts.
Here is the second set:
¡ | ¢ | £ | ¤ | ¥ | ¦ | § | ¨ | © | ª | « | ¬ | - | ® | ¯ | |
° | ± | ² | ³ | ´ | µ | ¶ | · | ¸ | ¹ | º | » | ¼ | ½ | ¾ | ¿ |
À | Á | Â | Ã | Ä | Å | Æ | Ç | È | É | Ê | Ë | Ì | Í | Î | Ï |
Ð | Ñ | Ò | Ó | Ô | Õ | Ö | × | Ø | Ù | Ú | Û | Ü | Ý | Þ | ß |
à | á | â | ã | ä | å | æ | ç | è | é | ê | ë | ì | í | î | ï |
ð | ñ | ò | ó | ô | õ | ö | ÷ | ø | ù | ú | û | ü | ý | þ | ÿ |
Note especially:
The first character in that second set is the non-breaking space. It is not used in proofing, but can be used in post-processing.
- -
- "Soft" or "invisible" hyphen. Never used in proofing, and rare in post-processing. It is basically the same as the "­" character in HTML.
- º ª
- Masculine and feminine ordinals. Don't use these in proofing unless the Project Comments say to. Normally replaced by ^o and ^a.
- ¼ ½ ¾
- "Vulgar fractions". Don't use these in proofing unless the Project Comments say to. Normally replaced by 1/4, 1/2, 3/4.
- ×
- Multiplication sign. The Project Comments should say whether to use this instead of the letter x.
Letters
Most Western European languages can be written in Latin-1. You've got:
- acute accent
- á é í ó ú ý Á É Í Ó Ú Ý
- grave accent
- à è ì ò ù À È Ì Ò Ù
- circumflex accent
- â ê î ô û Â Ê Î Ô Û
- umlaut or dieresis
- ä ë ï ö ü Ä Ë Ï Ö Ü
- tilde
- ã õ ñ Ã Õ Ñ
- extra letters
- ç Ç æ Æ ø Ø å Å ð Ð þ Þ
More information can be found at Wikipedia.